Not a keeper: I’m sure my son had fun making this in kindergarten and the colors are nice, but this is such an infantile piece of work and Cheerios might attract ants.

At first, I was enamored with their wonderfully abstract, messy work, and I’d tape pictures to the walls throughout the house and place sculptures on the windowsills. I put a few favorite pieces in Ikea frames and hung them in my bedroom. I had high hopes of organizing all the art in some sort of book or creating a massive collage in my kitchen.

And then the art just kept coming and coming. Piles of it. Bagfuls. What was I supposed to do with it all?

I bought a large plastic bin at the Container Store, and filled that up in a matter of weeks. I looked at some blog posts put together by incredibly creative moms showing me dozens of fun ways I could display and celebrate my children’s art. But the thought of decoupaging an Ikea table with my kids’ paintings nearly gave me an anxiety attack. I’d have to devote several weekends to making something like that.

That’s when I started to carefully edit their work, tossing some, but still keeping a lot.

At first it hurt to throw away the green and purple snake my son so carefully constructed with clay. I felt as if I was letting go of a piece of him, his childhood. (I’m a nostalgic person and have the tendency to hoard keepsakes…we can’t park in our garage…you get the idea.)

But then I quickly realized that I didn’t have the time to save and organize all of my kids’ art. Getting a decent hot meal on the dinner table every night seemed much more important.

And so I started tossing most of the art directly into the rubbish, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.

Amy Graff

It’s a keeper: I’m holding onto this self-portrait that my daughter did in preschool. Self-portraits are actually rare, and I wish that I had one for every year of my children’s life.

I still always keep a few of the most exceptional pieces and circulate them through the Ikea frames (at least aim to), and some works enjoy a few days of being on display in the kitchen. After all, I love their art, and I figure this honors them. Also, a couple times a year, I send a boxful to Grandma who has plastered her kitchen walls with my children’s creations. But the mass majority is tossed because I don’t have the time to deal with it nor the space to house it.

Plus, I wonder how a woven place mat made of construction paper will hold up over the years. Probably not well. And when my son is 50 years old, will he even be interested in seeing a faded scribble drawing he did of Elmo at age 3? Probably not.

Amy Graff

It’s a keeper: I love this watercolor of a turkey that my daughter did. If I were organized I’d take it out every Thanksgiving.

I try to involve my kids in deciding which pieces to keep but I’m often going behind their backs. Occasionally my kids catch me in the act of destruction. My daughter burst into tears when she saw me crumpling a Chinese lantern she made for an Autumn Moon Festival at school. “Mommy stop!” she cried. I told her that I’d hung the lantern in the kitchen for a week and it was time to say goodbye to it.

I guess I’m evil, but I’m not alone.

Not a keeper: Any collages made with magazine scraps immediately go in the recycling bin!

New York Times reporter Michael Tortorello wrote a piece earlier this week about parents who do the same thing. And Tortorello interviews some experts who say this throwing away your kids’ art a bad thing.

How much does a 4-year-old boy really care about his 50th portrait of Thomas the Tank Engine? Tortorello asks Dr. David Burton, a professor of art education at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “Once they’re through with it, they may lose interest in it very quickly,” Dr. Burton answers. “The process is more important than the product for the child.”

Burton is right, the kids probably won’t care much about their artwork later down the road. But what about Mom? Even though I’ve decided to toss at least 95 percent of what they produce, I still want some pieces to look at after my kids are all grown up so I can reminisce about the days when they were young.

Burton offers some advice:

“You could save every scrap of paper that the child ever made.” But don’t. A better plan, he said, is to store a child’s art in two boxes.

The first one is a temporary file for recent creations. The second is a kind of permanent vault, which holds a few selected works, spanning the course of 5 to 10 years. Each piece can include a makeshift museum card. Write the title of the piece, the age of the artist and the date. While parents are at it, they may want to add the story behind the picture in a sentence or two.

I like the idea of whittling the art down to two boxes, but when will I ever find time to make those museum cards? I typically just write the year on the back, if even that.

Parents: How do you deal with the piles of art your children bring home from school?